NetRequest™ Expands Facility Management

A manager in any field can’t manage without detailed information. How can we project the cost to replace floor coverings in building wing “A” in five years without an inventory of what exists now, a condition assessment of same, and the details of replacement costs projected into the future?

Facility management is the practice of coordinating the physical workplace with the people and work of the organization. The critical elements are those which improve quality, reduce costs, and improve efficiencies.

The benefits achieved by implementing NetRequest™ fall into three categories.

1. Savings in Facility Management Staff Time
Where facility management tasks are done manually, a case for specific cost savings can be made. In particular, where tasks such as departmental area calculations, generating space chargeback reports, producing color-coded departmental occupancy drawings, or producing CAD drawings annotated with employee names are currently done manually or are done on CAD without a CAFM system, substantial savings can be expected. The information will be more permanent and accessible to management.

2. Improvements in the Delivery of Facility Management Services
A significant benefit of a CAFM system is its ability to provide better information for making facility management decisions. With a CAFM system, it becomes much easier to identify under-utilized or vacant space, thus resulting in improved space efficiency.

Facility automation will result in increased capabilities for space planning, strategic planning and project implementation. This can lead to reductions in architecture & design costs. An added benefit is quicker turn-around time for planning requests. As-built and current CAD plans can be exported to architects and engineers to eliminate re-draw costs and speed the planning process.

It will be easier to maintain and manage Emergency Management Plans such as: Fire Exiting Routes, Tornado Shelter Areas, Emergency Shutoff Locations (water valves, electrical breakers and HVAC dampers) Lock-Box locations and key information, Fire Extinguisher locations and inspections, AHU locations and zones etc.

Facility automation provides the tools to report on all aspects of the facility. Manage flooring types, dates installed, current condition and estimate future replacement costs, replacement dates and locations.

The same is true for roofing by tracking roofing types, dates installed, current conditions and estimate future replacement costs, replacement dates and locations.
Create colored floor plans to print with the click of a mouse that depicts space usage by department. Accurate space utilization information is crucial for effective management of facilities. Currently, such information is usually not easily accessible to executives.
Facilities information can be communicated and shared throughout the organization. Management can be provided with the tools to make effective real estate decisions and give end users the ability to review data and interact with the facilities group. Asset locations are actual images of items throughout our facility. That is, the item(s) are represented by visually representative icons for all to see and understand, instead of being an A&E symbol that only the trades usually recognize.

3. Improvements in Organizational Efficiency
Many times the possible negatives are easier to quantify.  Without facility information immediately accessible in times of emergency, costs can quickly escalate. How much longer does it take to research paper plans or physically search for emergency shutoffs.  What will be the savings in property losses if we can call up current as-built floor plans on our network to immediately find emergency information? Current as-built CAD floor plans will be available immediately rather than a search through a paper print archive. The CAD plans combined with a scanned document archive of all the technical information found on blueprints gives immediate access to all the buildings information instantly.

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